Current network management procedures are concerned primarily with monitoring aspects, which do not provide real-time control capabilities. Network management involves a set of activities and techniques that are required to plan, design, control, maintain and grow a network infrastructure and its associated services. These activities include monitoring the network and the ability to take prompt action to efficiently maintain the service-level objectives and to control the flow of traffic when necessary. The OSI reference model classifies network management functions into five functional areas: fault management, configuration management, accounting management, performance management, and security management. These functions are collectively referred to as “FCAPS”. Network management activities also include detection, identification, investigation and resolution of faulty network elements and transmission facilities. In the 3G wireless networks and prior telecommunications environment, network monitoring is accomplished by logically connecting the network elements to remote Element Management Systems, which are under the control of one or more Network Management Systems (NMS). The NMS is collocated with various Operations Support Systems in a Network Operations Center (NOC). Effective network management depends on the coordination of controls across the various Element Management Systems. These controls may include schedule changes, provisioning, fault and configuration management modifications. In today's environment, control coordinations are handled by NOC engineers/operators through manual procedures, which present a number of setbacks for the complex and heterogeneous real-time multimedia traffic in 4G wireless networks. The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) framework is the dominant industry standard. The SNMP framework consists of three key elements: The standard Management Information Base (MIB), The Structure of Management Information (SMI), and The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). Despite its popularity, the SNMP framework has a number of disadvantages. The SNMP framework assumes a static managed object. Every data item must be carefully pre-defined, including its type, size and access restrictions before it can be used in the MIB.
With the complexity of real-time multimedia traffic streams across different bandwidths of wireless and wired networks, it would require tremendous time, effort and patience to accurately pre-define the wide variety of managed objects for real-time multimedia traffic in the wireless and wired networks, such as 4G networks. Moreover, modeling the characteristics of real-time multimedia traffic as static objects may lead to inaccurate representations. To retrieve SNMP data items (i.e., discrete values), the manager must periodically obtain/poll all the discrete values associated with the object(s); the manager stores the values, and determines whether the retrieved values are of interest then constructs complimentary information, which identifies implementation of appropriate network management functions. The lack of direct filtering mechanism makes real-time network management process cumbersome. The periodic polling of SNMP discrete values for multimedia traffic over a WAN connection consumes a lot of bandwidth, which may contribute to network traffic congestion due to the large volumes of diverse data items (i.e., attributes) associated with real-time multimedia traffic managed objects. The length of the pooling period, accompanied by the data analysis of the discrete values and subsequent information construction phases introduce latency, which is undesirable for real-time video communications.
Second-generation (2G and 2.5G) wireless systems, such as CDMA, GSM and IS-95 were designed primarily to transport speech and low-bit rate data in non real-time. A service provider's 2G or 2.5G wireless network is primarily homogeneous, and therefore easily managed by employing standards defined by the International Telecommunications Union for network management, such as Common Management Information Protocol (CMIP), Telecommunications Management Network (TMN) protocol.
The Third-generation (3-G) wireless networks support higher bit rate data, along with convergence of speech and data traffic. The 3-G systems including CDMA2000, UMTS, GPRS and WiMax were developed independently to target different service types and high bit-rate data services. The 3-G network management paradigm procedure is non-integrated. The International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 (IMT-2000) provides a family of standards for the telecommunications services. However, the SNMP is widely used for data services.
The Fourth-generation (4-G) wireless network paradigm, on the other hand, is designed to provide higher-bit rates for real-time video, voice and data traffic, which may traverse multiple wireless network technologies with different quality of network element technologies (reliability—Fault, Configuration), billing methods (Accounting), quality of service (QoS) levels (Performance) and Security policies. Hence A 4-G mobile user may concurrently connect to different QoS wireless networks with the expectations of higher-bit rates for real-time video, voice and data streams. Effective real-time network management methodology is therefore necessary in order to maintain higher-bit rates for real-time traffic. More particularly, it would be desirable that in the 4G wireless networks:                Equipment failures should be minimized and the potential impact of Faulty equipment resolved in real-time        The design of universal end-user terminals (and wireless network elements) to operate in different wireless networks imposes a new level of complexity (e.g., size, power consumption, operating systems) for a 4-G device Configuration. Configuration failures should therefore be resolved in real-time        Multiple operators may have different billing/Accounting systems. A mobile 4-G end-user's accounting information may be collected and managed from multiple wireless service providers. The end-user Accounting information should be collected seamlessly from the originating, transit and terminating nodes in various networks in real-time in order to provide detailed and accurate billing information to the 4-G mobile end-user        Degradation of end-to-end QoS for multimedia services that span multiple networks, IP and non-IP based systems should be detected and corrected in order to provide acceptable Performance levels in real-time        Different wireless networks may have varying levels of security. Hence to maintain uniform security across the originating, transit and terminating networks, it would be desirable to provide real-time Security across the impacted networks        
Today's network management procedures are reactive. To effectively manage real-time multimedia traffic in wireless networks, namely 4G wireless networks, there needs to be a paradigm shift from a reactive approach to a distributed, fully integrated, pre-emptive real-time network management and real-time control framework.